beginning of the internship

first of all, HAPPYYYYY (late) 21ST BIRTHDAY MEEESHAAAA :) i'm so excited you can finally come out with us and not have to drive everyone else around. i'm sad that i couldn't celebrate your birthday with you but obviously i'll bring you back something grrrreat from africa.

second of all, some good news i received today, a professor from California State University emailed me today asking for my permission to publish one of my essays in his textbook on how to write college essays! he found it because it was published after it came in second in an essay contest at JMU.

so mhairi (it's pronouced marie, she's irish) and i began our internship on tuesday. we met with the man who will be overseeing our project, which we named Supplimentary English Lessons at Glona Academy. at the meeting, we created a questionnaire to administer to the students' families and we discussed what we want the internship to be like. we're the first students to have an internship with Glona, so we have a lot of wiggle room with our project. essentially, we're each assigned 3 children to teach how to read and write by the time we leave. obviously, that is a pretty lofty goal, so we're going to see how far we can advance them before we go. i'm frustrated and sad that the internship is only two weeks long, and since we didnt even really begin it until wednesday, it's more like a week and a half. that is not nearly long enough to teach them what we're supposed to, but i know we are making a small difference at least.

our days are going to be split into two parts: a morning session and an afternoon session. the morning session is dedicated to children who need extra help with their english in addition to their afternoon classes. a few students from my old class are coming to the morning session. the afternoon one is dedicated to students who don't fit into any afternoon class. for example, two of mhairi and i's students are 23 years old. they are too old to join Glona officially but they need to learn. tuesday afternoon we spent getting to know the children we'll be teaching. two of the girls are supposed to come to the morning session, Gifty and Ellen, but they sell (street vendors) in the mornings so sometimes they come and sometimes they won't.

wednesday morning we visited each of the houses of the children that showed up for the morning session. the first house we went to was a very traditional and formal meeting. we sat down, and the family had a spokesperson who welcomed us and asked us the reason for our visit. we nominated a spokesperson and he told them our reason for visiting. then we were allowed to ask the questions on our questionnaire. the rest of the houses were much less formal, we said hi and then asked the questions. the purpose of the questionnaire was to assess the student's home life (number of people living in the household, household duties, etc) and to find out their reason for coming to Glona, and if they'd been to school before. we were walking all over La (the area the school is in and where most of the students live) and it was the first really sunny day in a while, so it was hotter and drier than usual. (on a side note, my dad asked me what the weather is like. it's almost always cloudy, most of the time it looks like its going to rain but it rarely does. the humidity isn't too bad, and the temperature is usually high 80s).

wednesday afternoon was our first real lesson. we started by giving the kids a test to see how much they know. the questions were simple and the test was oral: write the letter b, write the letter of the phonetic sound, etc. surprisingly the children did really well with the test, but once we started teaching them we realized they had learned how to fake knowledge to get good grades on the tests given to them. they can all spell apple or cat or sun, but only a few of them knew the sound that 'p' is supposed to make. mhairi and i then split the class into two groups of three. i had the ones who knew less (michael, who's probably 15; david, who is 23; and gifty who is probably 13 or 14). Gifty doesn't speak ANY english. she only speaks twi. i don't know how i'm expected to teach her when i can't even communicate with her. i've found that i'm learning just as much from her as she is from me, but that took a few days.

thursday morning was difficult. unlike the children in the afternoon session, the morning kids don't quite understand why they are with us or want to be there. it's alot harder to keep them interested in what i'm teaching. mhairi and i tried to play phonetic bingo with them, but they didn't know the phonetics to even play. i had 3 children again: Gifty, Moses, and Hannah. hannah and moses i'd had in my special class when i was volunteering with before. i think its amazing that they've both been at glona almost a year and still don't know the letters or the sounds that they make. it's a comment on them as students but also the teaching that goes on there. but it also makes me suspicious of their ability to learn. i think moses might have some form of ADD and hannah might have dyslexia. teaching them this morning was really hard and EXHAUSTING. i had no idea it could be so hard, or how completely drained i am after. the four of us struggled for a while, until i finally devised a method where they write the letter and at the same time say the letter outloud. i make them do this over and over again. this finally seemed to make an impression on them and i was so happy when they remembered. for some reason they had alot of fun while doing it too, they got a kick out of yelling the letter while writing it. go figure. they all just guess at what the letters are because they know that eventually they'll get it right. i have to teach them to recognized the letters for what they are, not just the order that the alphabet is in.

thankfully, the afternoon was much easier. the german teachers at glona are leaving this weekend, so they threw a party for all the kids. everyone was so excited about the party. they brought in sodas and food and even a dj. the kids were hilarious, dancing and tackling each other and throwing things and generally wreaking havoc. each class had prepared a song to sing to the germans and then each class sent up a soloist to sing another song. there was a dance contest, too. the children think mhairi and i are so funny when we try to dance. they love our cameras and the fact that they can see the pictures right after we take them.

i'm exhausted now and its only 9pm and i've got a lesson to plan for tomorrow, so good night.